Allison Rushby - It's Not You It's Me

One day, when we came home, there was an invitation under our door to my own wedding shower, organised by Mrs Kennedy in apartment 14. I went over, invitation in hand, to explain that we weren’t really married, but when she opened the door Mrs Kennedy and the three other ladies who were there planning the party were so excited I didn’t have the heart to tell them the truth.

It was a recipe shower, as it turned out, and I still have all the recipes in the scrapbook they gave me today. I don’t use the Miss Tenningtons’ mutton one very much—never, in fact—but the caramel fudge one from Mrs Holland comes in quite handy on rainy Sundays.

Jas and I became even more involved in building life after our fake marriage. We played croquet every second Saturday, and even started going to bingo on the second Tuesday night of each month. After our first night at bingo we made a pact.

We would draw the line at bowls.

Bowls, we decided, would be taking it too far. Apart from the white uniform being expensive, and a little more than unflattering, we agreed that it was probably best to save something for our own retirement.

As we got to know the people in the building better, little treats started to turn up on our doorstep. Lemon butter. Lime butter. Passionfruit butter.

There was a lot of butter.

Pumpkin scones, fruit scones and plain scones were also popular.

We’d do little things in return. Change lightbulbs. Open tough jars. Things like that. Whatever we could, really. But while things were tottering along beautifully with everyone else, it was at this time, around the six-month mark, that Jas started to act a little oddly.

I’d always thought it was strange that he never brought any friends back to the apartment. In fact, a few weeks after he’d moved in I’d noticed this and thought that maybe he was worried that it wouldn’t be OK with me. So I mentioned it, asked if he wanted to have a house-warming or something and invite all his friends along. He just shook his head. He was busy, he said. With his work. Now, I knew that he didn’t get on with his family very well, that they didn’t agree with what he was doing—studying music—but there must be people he socialised with, and why he didn’t want them in the apartment was a mystery.

As for me, I had people over by the dozen. My mother, my aunt Kath, friends from work, the odd love interest—whoever.

I didn’t give up on the friends thing with Jas, though. I would ask again, every so often, just in case he changed his mind. Or, that is, I kept asking until things went a bit strange. Because all of a sudden Jas started bringing people home. Every weekend. Always different ones.

And all girls.

The first time, I didn’t think much of it. I got up on a Saturday morning, half dressed, and went into the kitchen to find some tall blonde girl there I didn’t know. I knew Jas had been out the night before with some people from uni, but I didn’t know he’d brought someone home. I said hi, made a hasty cup of tea and scooted back to my room with the paper. When I emerged an hour or so later she was gone, and Jas didn’t seem to want to say anything about it.

The next week, it was the same.

There was a girl there Saturday morning.

And a different girl there Sunday morning.

All blonde and all tall. Well, maybe there was one bordering on brunette and one you might have called strawberry blonde…but always a different girl.

The weekend after that there weren’t any girls. Not here, anyway, because Jas didn’t even bother to come home.

Things went on like this for weeks. Girls arrived, then disappeared mysteriously early in the morning of the next day. For the short periods of time it was just us in the apartment Jas hid in his room, working furiously. He avoided me. He avoided everyone. He stopped going to croquet, he stopped going to bingo, he even looked as if he’d stopped eating, he got so thin. The ladies pressed new recipes on me, fattening recipes for lasagne and roasts and bread and butter pudding with butterscotch sauce.

I went through stages. At first I was worried—this wasn’t like Jas, not like the Jas I knew, anyway. Why was he suddenly so withdrawn when we’d been getting along so well? I tried to talk to him, but he dodged the questions, avoided me, simply didn’t come home. It carried on and on in the same way. The girls kept coming and would leave around midday. I’d stay holed up in my room until they left.

It was embarrassing, having to go out into the kitchen when there was a 99.9 per cent chance there’d be a half-naked girl in there who always looked too good for that time of the morning. And generally with a smile that even lemon-scented Jif and the scratchy side of the kitchen sponge wouldn’t be able to wipe off her face.

I just didn’t feel comfortable.

After weeks and weeks of this, I started to get a bit shitty. I was sick and tired of being a prisoner in my own room every weekend morning. And things had heated up. Girls came over during the week. And when, one Saturday, a few of my CDs went missing, I moved up from shitty to simply furious. I didn’t talk to Jas for the rest of the week and decided that if things kept up like this he was out.

But things didn’t stay like that at all. Because after that Saturday the girl thing stopped just as abruptly as it had started. Jas didn’t go out with the friends from uni any more, either. The friends I’d never met.

During the week that it all came to a halt Jas took me out for dinner and apologised awkwardly. He said he’d been stressed, that he’d gone a bit crazy, hadn’t known what he was doing, but now knew he’d been acting like an idiot. He promised it wouldn’t happen again.

I didn’t know where to look. I mumbled something in reply and that was that. After that evening we didn’t talk about it again. And a few weeks later things returned to almost normal between us.

For a while, anyway. Because as time passed I started to realise something about myself. A thing that came as a bit of a shock.

I knew I’d overreacted a touch about Jas having all the girls over—and I’d felt as guilty as hell when I’d found the ‘missing’ CDs under my bed a few weeks after Jas had hit the emergency stop button on the chick conveyer belt. In fact, I’d worried and fretted and carried on about the girl thing so much I was behind on my sculpting. Uni was suffering too. I’d already had one extension on an assignment I couldn’t seem to get started, and it didn’t look like as if it was going to be handed in any time soon. I’d simply spent hour after hour during those weeks sitting in the boat shed doing nothing. Staring at the walls. Staring at the floor. Staring at the ceiling.

And I was still doing it. The staring thing. Especially if I could hear the piano.

It wasn’t just that, either. There was the weekend thing too. The thing where I’d wake up at five-thirty or so every Saturday and Sunday morning like clockwork and lie there, wondering if there was a girl in Jas’s room. Praying that there wouldn’t be and being overjoyed when it was true.

I kept on like this for months.

And by the end of the year, just a few weeks before we were due to move out, I was so far behind on my work I realised I was never going to catch up in time to hold my exhibition. Not that I even wanted to any more. Because I’d been slowly realising that there was something wrong with it all. Something not quite right.

I couldn’t relate to what I was doing, where I was going with my sculpture—couldn’t get involved. Up at the apartment I’d hear Jas working away, completely absorbed in his songwriting, frustrating me with every note he played on the piano. I would have given anything, anything to be able to block out the world around me like Jas and my mother seemed to be able to do for hours at a time.